How Can I Get a Specific Phone Number for a Specific Service?

Normally, when you request a phone number through Tell A Bot, the system assigns a random available number from our pool. This ensures fair distribution and gives you the best chance of successful SMS verification.

However, there are situations where you may already know the exact phone number you want to use. For example, you previously used a number to verify a Yahoo account and now want to use the same number to verify Gmail, or another supported service.

This is possible through our API. When requesting a new number, simply include the &mdn= parameter containing the known phone number you want to reuse.

Example:

https://www.tellabot.com/api_command.php?cmd=request&user=test&api_key=0123456789&service=Gmail&mdn=12025551234

If that number has not already been used for the requested service and is still available, it will be assigned to your request.

For implementation details, please refer to Tell A Bot's API Command Reference, specifically the section covering reusing phone numbers.

If you don't need a particular phone number, but simply want one random number that can be reused across several services, please read our article: How to Request the Same Number for Multiple Services.